Can we take on this challenge?

[quantumuppercut]

build-a-better-bulb-for-a-10-million-prize.html: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance


As far as I know, It's not the light bulb but the circuit that can do this. Do we have a shot?

[Michael John Nunnerley]

Well Yes We Do

build-a-better-bulb-for-a-10-million-prize.html: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance


As far as I know, It's not the light bulb but the circuit that can do this. Do we have a shot?

You are right, it is not the bulb, it is how you drive it, end of story


Mike

[quantumuppercut]

You are right, it is not the bulb, it is how you drive it, end of story


Mike

I was thinking sneaking in a small circuit to drive the bulb.

[Stealth]

LED's

It should be a piece of cake to transform 110 ac to 4.5 dc to power an array of LED bulbs that would only use 30 miiliamps of elctricity. This is the technology in todays LED flshlights. These light can run for an extended amount of time on batteries. The reflector would have to be able to project light all over the room, instead of concentrating light, as a flashlight does. This is the thinking behind one of my projects to lessen the electric usage in my own home. LED's are the future, as far as economical lighting goes. Good Luck. stealth

[quantumuppercut]

It should be a piece of cake to transform 110 ac to 4.5 dc to power an array of LED bulbs that would only use 30 miiliamps of elctricity. This is the technology in todays LED flshlights. These light can run for an extended amount of time on batteries. The reflector would have to be able to project light all over the room, instead of concentrating light, as a flashlight does. This is the thinking behind one of my projects to lessen the electric usage in my own home. LED's are the future, as far as economical lighting goes. Good Luck. stealth

Thank you stealth. I know we could. The problem I was thinking last night is that the companies involve in this challenge concentrating on material science to accomplish this. I guess they overlook at other alternative routes than material.

The intrigue thing about this article is the sentence that say :"60 watts down to 10watts with same amount of light and color." Does DOE finally considered overunity?

[Iotayodi]

This kind of upsets me that the giants are working on it now. Why didn't they do it before. They knew these bulbs were inefficient. Another thing is why the government is doing this after they have already committed to ban incandescent bulbs. I still hope the Cfls and the Leds win out. They must drop the current draw and I dont see that happening with a standard incandescent bulb. In my opinion its another waste of taxpayers money given to the giants.

[morpher44]

wasted power with lighting

Walk into any Walmart, or Target, or BestBuy, or Costco, etc.
and you will see row after row, column after column of
florescent bulbs to light the shelves holding products waiting
for some buyer.

Multiply that by all these facilities around the world and you
can immediately get an idea of the enormous power being
consumed just to light some stupid product on some remote
shelf rarely visited by a customer.

What a huge waste!!!

That overhead makes the product more expensive ... passing
on that electric bill overhead to each and every product we buy.

Tesla had the solution more than 100 years ago. He could see
the mistake with the Edison system.
He was inspired to work on florescent bulbs for a lower power solution.

Crack open a CFL and you will see an array of electronics that make
that bulb EXACTLY consume a certain wattage of power, leaving
the customer no way to dial in the amount of power they want
to consume or to control the intensity of light like can be done
with an incandescent.

CFLs could be smarter than that. The Joule Thief circuit,
as applied to light CFLs is already a great step in lower-power
lighting ... and better yet you can easily control the frequency,
duty cycle, power factor, light intensity, etc. by making
adjustments to the resistor that is feeding the base of the
transistor. That resistor is NOT burning power ...
and there is NO resistive load on the output side.
Coils can be constructed with higher inductance, lower resistance.

Tesla knew that what you want are circuits that are NOT
resistive (which is waste in the form of heat), but only
reactive (using capacitance and inductance to your advantage
at resonance).

The answer lies with "resonance". At resonance, you can
achieve the lowest possible power ... with the highest possibly
power output.

Automatic systems to "tune" and find that resonance
can be done now with low power embedded processors.

So just as we have a thermostat in our homes to control
the temperature, so too could we have a
"resonance-finding" system to find that sweet spot
with highest resonance, lowest power consumed.

Also, those stores could utilize skylights & light pipes to the roof,
since their store hours are mostly during daylight hours.
Lighting during the day is a SIN.

To save on these in-store lighting costs, evaluate the trade
off of installing solar on the roof vs. just having skylights
and light pipes.
There are ways to make the light that enters from the roof
reflect around wherever you want it.
Its a low-tech invention called a mirror ... used by the
Egyptians in ancient times.

I think many "inventions" don't have to be new ... they can be quite
old ... and brilliant just the same.

[quantumuppercut]

This kind of upsets me that the giants are working on it now. Why didn't they do it before. They knew these bulbs were inefficient. Another thing is why the government is doing this after they have already committed to ban incandescent bulbs. I still hope the Cfls and the Leds win out. They must drop the current draw and I dont see that happening with a standard incandescent bulb. In my opinion its another waste of taxpayers money given to the giants.

It's true that they may have worked on it for a long time, however, in the article, the prize is still open for everyone while thousands of prototypes already sent for test. I'm guessing the giants can't make a break through. CFLs are ok if it's not for the mercury content, they argued. I think it's time for the giants to seek open idea or atleast donate funds to this forum.

@morpher44,

you're right, maybe we can make a resonance box intall in each house just for tunning light.

[Iotayodi]

Im hoping home inventors get the 10 million.

CFL vs. incandescent: Battle of the bulb | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Does mercury overshadow CFLs' benefits?
Fluorescent lights only release mercury when their glass breaks. Consider how often you shatter a light bulb while changing it, and divide that number by 10 — since a single CFL requires about that many fewer replacements — and that's your risk of mercury exposure.

An incandescent bulb doesn't contain mercury, but it still has a higher overall mercury footprint than a CFL, thanks to the coiled tube's renowned energy efficiency. Coal-fired power plants are humans' No. 1 source of mercury pollution, and energy-intensive incandescent bulbs require those plants to burn more coal than CFLs do. That extra coal burning releases far more mercury than even the combined amount inside a CFL and in the coal emissions needed to light it.